In the first half of 2004 Nvidia launched its brand new, high-end GeForce 6800 chip and in the summer it followed on with the GeForce 6600 mid-range chip, which is what you'll find under the heatsink of the Asus Extreme N6600GT.

The GeForce 6600GT is a souped up version of the plain 6600 which typically has a core speed of 500MHz and memory speed of around 1GHz if the card manufacturer uses DDR3, and that's exactly what Asus has done. This means that the 6600GT runs at the same core and memory speeds as the 6800GT, but as the 660GT has only got eight pixel pipelines and a 128-bit memory controller it can't compete with its big brother on performance.

It can, however, take the fight to the other cards in this group test, and the Asus beat them all by a healthy margin. Benchmark results are all well and good, but what counts is how the graphics card works in the real world, and here too the Asus impresses. You won't want to play top games such as Doom 3 with FSAA enabled, but games from a year ago can be played with all of the quality settings turned on, and that's just amazing for a £149 graphics card.

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That was our initial impression, so you can rest assured that when the Asus overclocked to the tune of ten percent we were ecstatic. Mind you, that was with Nvidia's Coolbits utility, rather than the Asus SmartDoctor software, as we found the latter to be a complete liability.

The Asus is the only graphics card in this group to have the SLI connection that we mentioned in the introduction, so if you have a suitable motherboard with two PCI Express x16 slots you can start your PC build with a single graphics card and then add in a second card at a later date. The Asus is an awesome graphics card for a very fair price.